Quantifying patent commercialisation to support engineering design

This project will investigate if crowdsourcing can be used to aggregate the content of disparate, open-data sources across the internet to determine which patents underpin commercial products, and organise and present these according to technical criteria in a visual "gallery" form appropriate for engineering design.

Patents are frequently used to quantify levels of innovation associated with specific regions or companies. However despite the development of sophisticated data mining tools to support the analysis of over 50 million online patent records, little is known about which patents are actually "commercialized" and how they are embodied in commercial products. Because of this "patent informatics" has been inherently limited to the study of the records, rather than the use, of Intellectual Property (IP). This information gap inevitably reduces the accuracy of academic and commercial analysis that use patent data for applications such as innovation research, R&D fore-sighting, and IP portfolio valuations. Furthermore, the presentation of existing data maps is not in a form that is useful for engineering designers when conceptualising and embodying products: it is predominantly text-based (and often deliberately obfuscated) when more visual presentation with exemplars and appropriate technical taxonomic terms would greatly enhance utility when undertaking engineering design development.

Crowdsourcing utilises large networks of open people to compete discrete tasks. Virtual tools are used to co-ordinate the distribution, payment and co-ordination of results, resulting in a labour market that is open 24/7 and a diverse workforce available to perform tasks quickly and cheaply. The distributed network of human workers provide on-line, "black-box", reasoning capabilities that could far exceed the capabilities of current AI technologies (i.e. genetic algorithms, neural-nets, case-based reasoning) in terms of flexibility and scope.

This project proposes that crowdsourcing can be utilised to access open data sources such as user manuals, product labelling, court proceedings and company web pages to understand which patents are actively used in current products and how they have been embodied. With a more accurate representation of innovation commercialisation, technical metadata (labelling), and utilisation, we envisage patent searches not as a stage-gate check but as a revitalised source of design inspiration. Indeed, if crowdsourcing proves a cheap, scalable way of collating this information and applying appropriate taxonomic and visual engineering information, it could fundamentally alter the early phases of engineering design. To this end, the project will result in a visualization tool that can be used to both guide and inspire design conceptualisation and embodiment.

The project's results will deliver impact to engineering designers, innovators, government policy and academic researchers in the following ways:

1. Engineering designers - The project will result in improved performance during the conceptual phase of engineering design. This will be achieved by delivering technical patent visualisation maps/galleries that designers can utilise as a reference and source of inspiration when undertaking design work. This will increase competitiveness by shortening the development cycle and producing better design solutions. We will share the results of the research through academic journals and conferences to allow other groups to implement similar crowdsourcing techniques to extract the maximum value from the current patent databases. The formulation of visual galleries and maps to support technical problem solving, however, could be an aspect to the work that can be packaged as a tool with commercial value. This will be assessed at the end of project Phase 3.

2. Innovators - Innovators in general will be able to identify the strengths and limitations of existing patents more easily by investigation of the physical products that embody them. The members of the project's steering committee who are all professionally involved in the effective use of IP support of innovators will facilitate this on a practical level with the research team presenting the principles of crowdsourcing and patent visualisation to the wider academic community.

3. Government policy - The results have the potential to significantly impact on policy and procedure in regards to patent management. As we have outlined in the case for support, there have been recent moves in the US to assess how crowdsourcing can be used to derive more meaningful information from the existing patent databases. If the proposed protocol proves successful, this could be applied to areas beyond engineering design and influence how governments and patent offices utilise data information as a means of innovation measurement. The project steering committee includes representatives from an executive agency (Intellectual Property Office), a public body (Scottish Enterprise) and a commercial patent attorney (Marks & Clerk). Ensuring the voices of all these groups are heard during the development and formulation of the crowdsourcing protocol is critical in ensuring the proposed approach is viable. The four steering committee meetings will act as a forum to review state-of-the-art and trends in patent policy, and also provide access to end users (patentees). By applying the initial results of the research within the steering committee members' organisations, we can assess reaction and effectiveness of the work, and inform our wider approach to impact.

4. Academic researchers - Those investigating the economic impact of patents will have quantifiable data on the products associated with particular patents. The data set generated through project Phase 2 (Scale up and benchmark) will be made available through the project website for others to download and utilise. Dissemination on the application of crowdsourcing process will be via conference presentations and specialist journal papers (e.g. World Patent Information). Similarly, the presentation of the patent visualization method and its implications for the design process will be presented to engineering design researchers via high impact journals such as Design Studies and Research in Engineering Design. Publication activities will be led by the PI with support from the RA and the rest of the academic team.